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Title: My Anti-Cull Philosophy Author: Julian Langer Date: 26/6/2021 Language: en Topics: Cull, anti-cull, speciesism, anti-speciesism, dialectics, anti-dialectics, individualism, activism, ontological anarchism, primal anarchy, mass extinction, conservationism, preservationism, egoism, eco-egoism, philosophy Source: https://ecorevoltblog.wordpress.com/2021/06/26/my-anti-cull-philosophy/
Yesterday I felt fury, after reading reports regarding government plans
to extend the culling of badgers on this island in the North Sea, for
several years. I felt a hateful rage, which embodies a far less likeable
aspect of my personality than those aspects most people would likely
wish to encounter.
After having been involved in anti-cull rebellion since 2015 and living
in North Devon, frequently seeing dead badgers by the side of the road,
I have come to experience a deep personal sense of care for these
beautiful creatures. Finding a sett with healthy looking entry points
brings an experience of joy to me, which would undoubtedly be considered
bizarre to most members of this culture. I experienced this joy
yesterday when I visited the sett that I was regularly checking during
the 2020 cull season and will be checking regularly this year too. It is
a huge sett and had all the signs of being active with badger life
coming in and out, living as they do, despite the pesticidal, specicidal
machinery attempting to negate their living presence. I do not mind
sharing here that I did a small dance at the sight of these stunningly
gorgeous holes in the ground – probably looking utterly ridiculous to
the birds, squirrels and trees who shared the space with me in that
moment. When I got back to my house my wife asked me how the sett was
looking and I was so pleased to tell her, going on to say that I am
probably going to write something about the cull (again).
This morning I saw more reports on the government plans to extend the
cull for several years – possibly even longer than I had read yesterday.
I was hit with a deep feeling of sadness and an experience of despair
that hit me in the centre of my chest, sitting there like a crow calling
out so often as to render forgetting its presence impossible.
I had in mind other activities to engage in today, but the crow’s
calling persisted in my chest, leaving me with the awareness that a
primal and immediate aspect of my Being was communicating to my
conscious awareness that now another activity was more desirable.
Listening to this visceral, instinctual voice within my body, I decided
that I would put off those other activities and begin writing this
piece.
The most difficult part of writing anything for me is the space that
comes before the writing of the first sentence. There is an intense
cosmological quality to starting to write something for me, which is
frankly absurd and stupid, but is undeniably the truth of my experience.
Because it is an absurd activity, as I know that writing this is not
going to stop cull-culture or save badgers from
mass-extinction-machinery, but yet I feel this intense experience of
existential responsibility regarding whether or not a choose to write
about this matter and how I write about it. I have decided though that I
will embrace the absurdity of the act and write about badgers and the
cull, but how now to do it? Do I write an inspirational call to action,
reminiscent of revolutionary rhetoric? Perhaps I will attempt to write a
very logical assessment of why the cull makes no rational sense, with a
moral case against the practice, detailing aspects of animal cruelty?
Maybe I will write an open letter to my MP and publish it in the hopes
that it might encourage others to do so, possibly motivating the
politician to appeal in parliament for the end of the culling? I mean,
fucking hell, how do I go about putting the caw of this crow and the
beauty of those holes in the earth, into words for someone to read and
maybe decide to rebel against cull-culture?
The words “quit over rationalising this you daft tit” come into my head
and I decide to write this as I have been doing so – as a personal, raw,
individualistic account of my experience on the matter. I find beauty in
what has been described as uncivilised writing[1] and feel happy with
this approach to describe the crows calling.
Tomorrow writing this piece will be less of a struggle, as the great
cosmological event of “beginning” has occurred. There will be less
anxious, confused moving from one direction to another and more moving
from space to space, that will be more akin to shinrin yoku praxis.
I will leave this here today with one story of my experiences in cull
resistance that I feel to share here. In my second year involved in
anti-cull rebellion, when out with a hunt sab group, we were walking
across a field at night, after having checked the woods at the far side
from where we had parked. We were aware of badgers playing a short
distance away from us in the field, but were unaware of the shooters
behind us, who must have snuck in while we checking the woods. I felt
the bullet go past the left side of my torso, as it displaced the air
between it and me. Moments later, we felt the badger die in our arms, as
we desperately attempted to bring them to the car alive, to take them to
a wildlife hospital. It was this experience, more than any other, than
confirmed to me the intensity to which this culture is waging a violent
campaign upon wildlife, akin to other militarist efforts in
cultural-extermination. My awareness of this remains today and I remain
on the side of wildlife. I will speak about “tomorrow” tomorrow …
Yesterday I decided that this section would be titled as it is and took
opportunities to reflect on those words. “Respect existence or expect
resistance” is a phrase I have come across often in anti-cull media and
is probably my favourite radical-slogan – or is equal to the line “death
to Gilgamesh”, which I was informed is, or was, a popular statement
amongst Rojavan anarchists, the YPG and YPJ. I’m not generally a fan of
sloganing and find that it often cheapens and weakens the communication
of statements that I find valuable. An example of this would be the
Situationist line of “be realistic, demand the impossible”, which I’ve
seen to my horror being used in electoralist party propaganda. It
strikes me as utterly tragic to encounter this 5 word poem, created out
of anti-Spectacle desires, to be Spectacularised into the theatre of
parliamentary musical chairs. It seems to me though that those who are
most responsible for this situation are those radicals who sloganized
this statement of surrealist rebellion to the intensity that it has
been. But moving back to the subject of “respect existence or expect
resistance”, as far as slogans go, I am quite fond of this one.
“Yeah yeah, okay Julian, we get it – you like the punchy word
collection. But, so what?” Okay, yes, I will go into the phrase further,
but first I am going to clarify two factors regarding what it is I am
stating he. First of all, due to the egoism I am bringing to this
writing, I am not seeking to morally justify this statement and
encounter nothing that requires me to provide any justification than is
greater than my experience of desire. After this, due to the absurdism I
am also bringing to this writing, I shall not seek to provide anything
more than reasoning that is absurd reasoning [2] as unreasonable
reasoning, accepting the limits of this attempt to articulate any reason
behind these words or reason for valuing them. You might read these
stipulations and decide to disregard what comes next, favouring writings
that attempt to hide the writer’s subjective-individuality and the
absurdity of their attempts at reasoning – that is, of course, your
choice.
Moving on now.
Respect. Respect is one of those words that is used in so many different
ways, meaning many different experiences, that your use of the word
might be totally the reverse of mine. As I encounter the notion of
respect though, I notice how there are two immediate qualities to it:
how I experience an-other and how I treat them. To respect this other
individual before me I first experience the sensation of being affected
by them with the feeling of respect – I encounter their presence as a
being who affects me with the affirming feeling of respecting-them,
which is generally quite a pleasurable experience, with the sense of
positive-relationship it brings. How I treat them, following this
experience of positive affirmation, manifests out of a desire to care
for them, as a presence that I encounter as valuable enough to care for.
(It is hopefully apparent that this description of respect in no way
pertains to the authoritarian narratives regarding “respect” that are so
often drilled into the ideological rhetoric of this culture!) Towards
those badgers who the cull-advocates are seeking the annihilation of, my
experience of respect for their presence as an-other, who I encounter as
desirable, inspires me to seek to care for them, as best I can.
Existence. Not wanting to go too deeply into the matter of existence and
what that means here, I would encourage any individual reading this to
read my piece regarding Gorgias’ Trilemma and my reversal of his
position to state as an affirmation that “nothingness exists”, “nothing
exists”, “no-Thing exists”, “existence is nothing”, “existence is
no-Thing” and “existence is nothingness” [3]. (Assuming that this has
been read, or my meaning here is understood, I will continue.) How this
pertains to the affirmation of badgers as existing as being
nothing/no-Thing/nothingness is to affirm their lived presence as not
conforming to the dictates of this culture’s Thing-Reality, which does
not really exist. The point here is that they are living beings, not
objects for the purpose of this culture’s Man-ipulation (of which there
really are none).
Expect. The meaning of the word “expect” here, certainly in my eyes, is
one of a threat, which holds the statement together beautifully. It
positions the force of an active will as a being lurking in the darkness
of expectation. The expectation is not an imaginary future though – some
kind of utopian salvation. The expectation is a hear and now lived
experience of a psychologically immediate presence, intended to bring to
the attention of cull-ideologues the presence of this being in the dark,
prepared to enact this threat.
Resistance. Resistance is the actualisation of the threat that was
positioned in “expect”. But what does resistance mean? Well, to groups
like the Jensenite organisation Deep Green Resistance, “resistance”
means “organised political resistance”, generally positioned as a
solution to a problem – a very optimistic notion. For myself, this is
not what resistance means, largely due to my doubts regarding political
organisations and my corresponding awareness of how this notion of
resistance both requires the “problem”, so that they can be “solution”,
and actually, generally, supports the “problem” more than challenges –
an example of this being how trade unions now, for the most part,
support capitalist infrastructure, by making it more comfortable for
“workers”, so as to neutralise any potential challenge to capitalism,
rather than actually challenging capitalism. As I encounter resistance
in this statement I encounter it as a position of refusing to conform to
the ideology of cull-culture and a refusal to tolerate it. The
intolerant destruction of cull-ideology is the positive affirmation of
the living presence of badgers – feral iconoclasm [4], as I wrote about
in my book with that title.
So the statement “respect existence or expect resistance” means to me
this – positively affirm the living presence, through care, of the
living beings called badgers, who are not Things, or expect to
experience iconoclastic-destructive intolerance of a rebellion that
refuses to embrace cull-ideology. Not wanting to go too deep into the
realms of differance, I am comfortable leaving this meaning as it is.
As I approach writing this section an avoidant, weaker, part of my being
is tempted to put off starting this section to tomorrow. I wrote about
tomorrow in my piece Doomed To Deferral [5] stating –
“Ultimately, you and I will both be doomed, if we rest our hopes on
reading or writing tomorrow, but perhaps being doomed is a decent enough
ending to start at.”
and,
“Perhaps there is something to be said about being hopeless and fearless
today.”
I am going to begin this section today, as I have done, and I have
decided that I will finish it another day. Cull rebellion happens
between many sunsets and sun rises, not as a History, with a future to
achieve, but as a lived experience of being cosmically tiny, immersed in
an ever changing space, which too large to ever fully comprehend.
But anyway, 200 species …
When I try to comprehend the scale of mass-extinction devastation I am
struck by the sheer horrific vastness of the situation. It is both
immediately happening where I am and a planetary event, far greater than
the limits of my embodied power to affect. The cosmic-pessimism that
this brings would be dishonest to deny, especially considering the
will-to-life it took for living beings to overcome previous
mass-extinction events, with all the struggling and suffering that would
have involved. The intensity of the strength and power of those beings
who lived amidst those mass-extinction events is truly heroic to me,
with all the tragedy that real heroism involves, given their inevitable
deaths, which fuelled the births of other beings who also lived and
struggled and suffered amidst mass-extinction.
When I first encountered the statistic of 200 species going extinct a
day I was awestruck by the sheer magnitude of that scale of
annihilation. To comprehend this culture’s totalitarian practices as
that colossal was, as they say, “mind blowing”. And as I come to write
about this here I am aware of my inability to truly comprehend the
entirety of this matter, feeling somewhat “mind blown”. So I am going to
move away from writing this for the moment, go into my garden and sit
with the wild flowers, bugs, birds and cats who generally share that
space with me. I have started this section today, as I decided I would,
and now feel like my energies are best put into experiencing other
living beings who are also living amidst mass extinction. I will come
back to this tomorrow, or more likely the day after (as I am aware that
tomorrow is likely to be very busy and active, leaving me unlikely to
have the mental energy to write more here) …
…
The pause in writing this has been a few days. As I am writing, I am sat
in my living room, after just having eaten breakfast, with some ambient
music playing, the window open and allowing the sound of birds chirping
to be heard over the music, and it is a cloudy and chilly morning. Also,
as I am writing this now, today, the G7 event is happening in Cornwall,
which is a relatively short drive from where I live, with politicians
and protesters having flooded to. Last night I meditated on this
political spectacle of Greenification and this morning I have sat with a
feeling of longing that, after G7, those who have travel through cull
zones will seek to challenge cull-practitioners, on their return
journeys home. I will share more about my meditations later in this
piece though and return focus for now on the subject of this section.
So, mass extinction. Fucking hell; how do I write about this here? To
attempt to write something on mass-extinction, through Mesodma, I
engaged in speculative palaeontological-realist fiction [6]. But I am
not going to do that here. I could attempt to explain the
machinery/apparatus of mass-extinction culture, so that someone reading
might encounter new informational nuggets that enlighten them to
situation at hand – in the ways that many environmentally minded
individuals and groups try to do. But I don’t believe that that approach
to writing holds much value.
I tend to focus on encouraging individuals to turn their attentions to
their immediate, authentic, experience of living amidst mass-extinction
culture/machinery (civilisation/Leviathan as I would generally describe
it), with an affirmation of the primal life desire, will-to-life/power,
that I notice in all those I see embracing their being-alive. With this
affirmation of individual, egoistic, experience, I have affirmed a
position of rejecting species-being throughout much of my writing, which
I will also do here – this coming from an ontological perspective that
fits a nominalist mode of thought, which I have also named as eco-egoism
(see my essay An Eco-Egoist Destruction of Species-Being and Speciesism
[7]). From this perspective an uncomfortable encounter hits me and that
is the prospect that every individual is actually an Endling, the last
of their kind and that every death is an extinction event. This does not
neutralise the devastation that is mass-extinction culture in any way –
at least, not for me – as it actually does the opposite, with every
individual living being’s life being far more intensely unique and
rarefied and valuable, than any collectivised analysis could pertain-to.
How does this relate to badgers and/or anti-cull philosophy and
practices? Well first of all, yes, I do talk and write about the
species-collective called badgers, mostly for easy(er) communication.
But as I consider the abusive practices enacted towards those living
beings I might name as “badger”, my feeling of horror, disgust and
revolt is not lessened by the notions of “population numbers” or
“percentage being-culled”, as I feel intolerant towards the pesticidal
abuse enacted towards any of these individuals. Just because the numbers
of those named as Melee Melee (another name for badgers) are said to be
generally increasing, I do not encounter the life of any individual to
be lesser for this, nor their experience of desiring-life. Along with
this, I am not attempting to “save the species”, as I know that would be
a ridiculous thing for me to attempt – akin to trying to be a badger
messiah, providing salvation for “the people”. Rather, I wish to defend
those individuals, who share living in this space that is local to me,
from cull-machinery. While I can speak to my disgust towards the cull in
its entirety, my anti-cull rebellion is localistic to the cull zone that
I live in and directed towards caring for individual setts fiercely,
rather than the species in an exhausted manner.
I know that it is not within my authentic power and responsability
(ability-to-respond) to save any species from mass-extinction culture. I
do, however, have the power, responsability and desire to care for
individuals who I encounter in my life as willing their primal-life
desire as a rebellion in the face of Leviathan.
With regards to the aforementioned meditation I had last night, one of
the points that came into my awareness regards 4 positions that I find
as fair generalisations for environmentalist psycho-philosophical
“camps” – hopeless-helpless, hopeful-helpless, hopeful-helpful and
hopeless-helpful.
With regards to hopeless-helplessness, I do not feel entirely rejecting
of the position, but have no desire to embrace it for myself. I can
sympathise with the feelings of hopelessness and that the world is a
very dark place to be, but encounter the position of helplessness as
basically pathetic and weak. The individual who has no desire to help or
are frozen by a lack of help in their life is not one I encounter as
beautiful, but I can affirm their honesty in the sense of
cosmic-pessimism.
The hopeful-helpful position is also one that I neither entirely affirm
nor reject. While I do not share their faith in political-narratives
and/or green-technologies, in any way, I find their willingness to care
for wild living beings beautiful and desirable. From my perspective,
this it a naĂŻve stance to take regarding hope, but the beauty of the
helpful activities are wonderful to encounter.
Hopeful-helplessness is to my eyes a position that is utterly grotesque
and revolting. To place faith entirely in the political-productive
machinery of Leviathan, whilst offering nothing of help or attempting to
deny the responsability that being a living-free-individual involves, is
revolting to my eyes. But sadly this appears to be the position pedalled
most often – that we are helpless and must place our hope in abusive
apparatus.
This position that I affirm in its entirety and very much occupy is that
of helpful-hopelessness. To be without any feeling of hope, not
believing that salvation is coming, seems to me an honest position. I
feel this and encounter a sense of desire to help those who I experience
care for. I encounter individuals who occupy this position as intensely
beautiful, for their strength, honesty and will.
I have no hope that the system will stop seeking to repress the lives of
individuals we name as badgers, but experience a desire to help those
individuals survive free from cull-machinery. It is not a comfortable
place to be, but it is where I am.
It has been a week since I finished the last section. I’ve not written
any more for this, nor have I done any sett checks in the past week. In
all honesty, as I type this, I am pretty tired, after trying to do too
much, recovering from my second dose of covid-19 vaccine and having to
sort out unexpected car problems. This type of experience is very common
to individuals who are engaged in activist activities – feelings of
being burnt out and needing to rest. And activism is the focus of this
section.
So, activism, what the fuck does activism mean – or, what does it mean
to me (and might do to you soon)? Well, that is a huge question really.
I will start my consideration of the question by considering how my
“activism” differs from (perhaps?) the definitions of other individuals
who consider themselves “activists”. Then I will describe what
“activism” means for me, with specific reference to my anti-cull
activities.
My “activism” is not that of “organising” or “organisation” – though I
do appreciate the activities of organised hunt saboteur groups. In my
experience, the energies gone into “organising” and the “organisation”
are often wasted life potential, gone into constructing
anthropological-machinery for the Cause, rather than seeking to
deconstruct and destroy abusive anthropological-machines. Likewise, I am
not interested in activism or activists as experts(/authorities) or
martyrs, as that typically has the smell of vanity-missionary work, that
is entirely about activists positioning themselves socially as objects
for worship – I’m thinking in particular here about the media driven
activities of the organisation Extinction Rebellion and its worshipers,
as well as the organisation Burning Pink (another project very much
infected with Roger Hallam’s vanity-missionary agenda). This form of
“activism” revels in that most tragic of successes, the small
incremental improvement that satisfies the appetites of those who were
seeking to have their actions affirmed by state and/or corporate
infrastructure – ultimately supporting Leviathan’s abusive practices, by
making its violence more comfortable to live amidst so that rebellion is
less likely – or, if nothing else, press attention.
What activism means for me is care, expressed as an authentic,
immediate, affirmation of the presence of life. My desire to affirm the
presence of living badgers is actualised through my practice of
defending setts without mediatory organisations/groups, as an individual
activity. This generally involves going to visit setts and checking that
they are free from abusive apparatus. But there are other aspects of my
anti-cull activist practice and to describe these I am drawing from my
thoughts on Massumi’s ideas on the principle of unrest (the book by the
same name is excellent reading on activism and ontology) [8]. The 3
concepts I am going to focus on here are those of unrest, affectivity
and capture. With regards to unrest, I agree with Massumi that there is
no such phenomenon or thing as rest, and would affirm this with regards
to self-care as an aspect of activist unrest, as the processes of change
occurring within my body. Rather than self-care being, as many
“revolutionaries” would position it, being a form of passive liberal
indulgence, (my) self-care affirms (my) living bodies (as my
individuality is a multiplicity of living bodies) as activist unrest, as
I encounter myself as Earth and the living world extending from my body
– the attempt at totalising rest(/death) being Leviathan itself. Taking
the principle of unrest seriously and considering Leviathan’s
anthropological machinery as an attempt at totalising rest(/death), it
is impossible to not be an activist, as being alive is unrest, with
death being being-impossible – where activisms differ is in what they
are active in, i.e. the difference between ideological, political,
work-placed activisms and life affirming activisms. The second concept
of affectivities enters into my thoughts on my practice when I consider
what is going to intensify my ability to affect the well-being of
badgers most significantly. So today, rather than going to do sett
checks, I have decided that I will self-care, through giving myself
space to recover, and write here, so that I might psychically affect
other individuals who read this. Affectivity in this sense is not
attempting to Cause an effect, as in determinism, but to effectively
affect the world as an (absurd) act of care. In much the same way that I
am always at unrest, I am always affecting the world, as I affect this
chair I am sat on, I affect the air through my breathing, I am affecting
this piece through writing, I can affect other individuals through weird
conversations and breaking social conventions through everyday
activities and so on. The last concept I will comment on here is that of
capture, which is very much at the core of my rebellion – rebelling
against the apparatus of capture being at the core of many of the ideas
in my book Feral Life. I am revolted – as both disgusted by and inspired
to revolt by – by the apparatuses of badger capture and annihilation,
with my desire for total liberation being my desire for the destruction
of the anthropological apparatuses of capture that is mass-extinction
machinery/culture. As such, my activism is foremost resistant towards
the structures of capture that constitute this culture’s Reality. I
describe this practice as being neither above-ground or under-ground, as
I find that dualism in (so called) activist praxis to be both unhelpful
and bullshit – with individuals like Max Wilbert who peddle that
rhetoric succeeding only in propagating organisational theatrics. How I
describe my activist praxis is non-localisable localism, which is easily
differentiated from the localisable non-localism of green ideologues who
are concerned only with the easily locatable matters of international
green industries and politics, with no authentic relationship to the
space that they are here/now. Being non-localisable, the practice is
very difficult to find (if you’re not very close to me), but its
intensely local to where I choose to live – as I live in the middle of
one of the cull zones and actualise my rebellion here.
Now that I have finished this section, I feel that my activist praxis is
best placed in doing some dancing, cooking some dinner, bathing and then
sleeping. I will likely start the next section tomorrow, which I have
been planning over the past few days.
In my book Feral Life, I wrote a meditation on conservationism as “jam
jar” politics and articulated my feeling of revolt towards the ideology.
What I mean by “jam jar” politics is simply the Man-ufacturing of a
preserve, which is reminiscent of making jams from fruits to keep the
fruit longer for Humanised consumption – rather than preserving the
presence of the fruit outside of anthropological systematisation by
leaving it as it is where you encounter it in the world, or eating it as
you encounter it and doing something to care for the space where you
found it, which I put forward here as a mode of preservationism
(somewhat akin to Quinn’s notion of being-a-Leaver). The jam-jar
preserves of conservationism are intensely Man-aged and Man-ufactured
spaces, with the ideological focus being on preserving the flavours of
what was once a living space for future generations of Humans to
“enjoy”, so that green-ideologues feel less guilty about the industrial
ecocidal and specicidal annihilation that this culture enacts, almost
everywhere at its current totalising state.
Recently two conservationist organisations have reminded me of how
intensely I dislike the ideology. The more recent of these instances is
the Mammal Society spreading speciesist rhetoric about racoon dogs as
being a “non-native invasive species” and a threat to the wildlife on
this island on the North Sea. Calling any living being invasive for
migrating from where they live while trying to survive amidst the
totalitarian violence of Leviathan, whether they be Syrian refugees or
racoon dogs, is just ridiculous, especially as it is coming from an
intensely invasive culture, technologically, ecologically, militarily
and through essentially all other forms of dialectical systemisation. I
am also repulsed by the positioning of wild animals as invaders and a
threat to living beings here, when cull-practitioners are blocking the
entrances and exits to setts, are out with guns amd are putting cages
near setts to capture living beings and annihilate them. The other
recent example of revolt inspiring conservationism is learning of the
John Muir Trust engaging in deer culling – something Muir would have
been disgusted by, with its conservationist non-preservationism.
The distinction between conservationism and preservationism, within
environmentalism, as practices has its roots in the disagreements
between Pinchot and Muir. Muir, who interviewed bears and considered the
preservation of forests to be defending God’s first temple [9], sought
to affirm an intrinsic value in the living world through his
preservationism, with his desires being that bears and forests would be
left to live their lives without experiencing interference from
Leviathan. Pinchot’s conservationism, which was embraced by the American
political establishment and has sadly become the go-to rhetoric of many
environmentalists, sought to position instrumental (systemic/machinic)
value in some living beings, as being worth keeping (as property) for
their usefulness to Leviathan. The difference between these perspectives
is largely the difference between transcendentalism (Muir) and
materialism (Pinchot).
In my book Feral Iconoclasm I articulated my rejection of materialism
(as a dead perspective), through an affirmation of hylozoic-physicalism,
and don’t feel any need to differentiate from materialism further, as it
is clear that I am rejecting the tendency. But while I do not embrace
materialism (and conservationism), I do not share entirely Muir’s
perspective regarding preservationism, for its transcendentalist
qualities. Intrinsic value, God and transcendence to me are spooks and
phantasms. To differentiate from transcendentalism here I will use the
thoughts of two relevant transcendentalists, who have both inspired and
influenced my thought and practice.
The first of these is Henry David Thoreau, who stated -
“This is one of those instances in which the individual genius is found
to consent, as indeed it always does, at last, with the universal. ….
Faith, indeed, is all the reform that is needed; it is itself a reform.
When the sunshine falls on the path of the poet, he enjoys all those
pure benefits and pleasures which the arts slowly and partially realize
from age to age. … The winds which fan his cheek waft him the sum of
that profit and happiness which their lagging inventions supply.”[10]
in his piece Paradise To Be Regained, and –
“Ah, the pickerel of Walden! when I see them lying on the ice, or in the
well which the fisherman cuts in the ice, making a little hole to admit
the water, I am always surprised by their rare beauty, as if they were
fabulous fishes, they are so foreign to the streets, even to the woods,
foreign as Arabia to our Concord life. They possess a quite dazzling and
transcendent beauty which separates them by a wide interval from the
cadaverous cod and haddock whose fame is trumpeted in our streets.” [11]
in his most famous work, Walden. Thoreau’s affirmation of religious and
transcendent qualities of the living world is largely shared by his
friend Ralph Waldo Emerson, who, in his piece Nature states –
“Who looks upon a river in a meditative hour, and is not reminded of the
flux of all things? Throw a stone into the stream, and the circles that
propagate themselves are the beautiful type of all influence. Man is
conscious of a universal soul within or behind his individual life,
wherein, as in a firmament, the natures of Justice, Truth, Love,
Freedom, arise and shine. This universal soul, he calls Reason: it is
not mine, or thine, or his, but we are its; we are its property and men.
And the blue sky in which the private earth is buried, the sky with its
eternal calm, and full of everlasting orbs, is the type of Reason. That
which, intellectually considered, we call Reason, considered in relation
to nature, we call Spirit. Spirit is the Creator. Spirit hath life in
itself. And man in all ages and countries, embodies it in his language,
as the FATHER.”
and -
“To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature. Most persons do not
see the sun. At least they have a very superficial seeing. The sun
illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and the
heart of the child. The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward
senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the
spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood. His intercourse with
heaven and earth, becomes part of his daily food. In the presence of
nature, a wild delight runs through the man, in spite of real sorrows.
Nature says,—he is my creature, and maugre all his impertinent griefs,
he shall be glad with me. Not the sun or the summer alone, but every
hour and season yields its tribute of delight; for every hour and change
corresponds to and authorizes a different state of the mind, from
breathless noon to grimmest midnight. Nature is a setting that fits
equally well a comic or a mourning piece. In good health, the air is a
cordial of incredible virtue. Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles,
at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any
occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect
exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear. In the woods too, a man
casts off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what period soever
of life, is always a child. In the woods, is perpetual youth. Within
these plantations of God, a decorum and sanctity reign, a perennial
festival is dressed, and the guest sees not how he should tire of them
in a thousand years. In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There
I feel that nothing can befall me in life,—no disgrace, no calamity,
(leaving me my eyes,) which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare
ground,—my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite
space,—all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am
nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate
through me; I am part or particle of God. The name of the nearest friend
sounds then foreign and accidental: to be brothers, to be
acquaintances,—master or servant, is then a trifle and a disturbance. I
am the lover of uncontained and immortal beauty. In the wilderness, I
find something more dear and connate than in streets or villages. In the
tranquil landscape, and especially in the distant line of the horizon,
man beholds somewhat as beautiful as his own nature.”[12]
From the transcendental perspective, preservationism is God’s Cause as
explosive holism, as seen here in both Thoreau’s and Emerson’s writings,
with the intrinsic value being an essential, soul-like, quality that is
appealed to.
How my preservationism differs is that I don’t experience badgers, or
any other species or individual, as being intrinsically valuable or
being expressions of God’s will. My preservationism is explosive holism
reversed –implosive holism. Rather than intrinsic value, I experience
badgers as egoistically valuable/desirable, not for instrumental value,
but for the immediate joy of their presence in my world. The reversed
holism is subscendental, in that preservation isn’t a mode of connecting
to God through transcendence, but an experience of being-me, of
encountering my being and the world as extending from me and me from the
world, as an unending paradox. From this, badger preservationism is
self-preservationism, not a Cause, but an expression of
egoistic-will-to-power/life – I actualise my being through the practice
of preservation. Subscendence, as I encounter it, is individualising,
rather than collectivising – in the same way that I described earlier on
species-being. I also want to note here that one of the key differences
between transcendental-preservationism and subscendental-preservationism
is the difference between spirituality and mystical-experience –
(transcendental-)spirituality being something bound to words and
(subscendental-)mystical experience being ineffable. There is an obvious
absurdity to any self-preservation, which my absurdism is happy to
accept.
Anarchy is here. Anarchy is now. I experience anarchy most intensely
when among the living, usually while surrounded by badger setts, trees
and bird song, but it is not separate from my body. My bodily presence
is the ontological actualisation of primal-anarchy – not as
anthropological performance, but as the free expression of my will.
The anarchy of my anti-cull rebellion is my refusal to accept
systematisation, to accept the systemic abuse of these living beings I
encounter as egoistically valuable. It is primal in two senses. The
first of these senses is that it is not bound to secondary or other
mediatory “higher levels” of activity (rejecting that hierarchy), which
are bound to organisational practices. It is also primal in that it is
an expression of becoming-animal.
My anarchy is individualist and subscendentally-holist –
psychic-nomadism as being here, being nowhere, being-in-the-world and
being-the-world. My anti-cull rebellion is individualistic and subscends
to affirm the lives of badgers as being valuable to my
self-preservation.
Today it is really difficult, for me at least, to find a starting point
to discussing the cull – in a similar way that anti-cull practice is
really difficult to find a place to start with. It has been a few days
since I last added to this piece and as I am sat here I am unsure how to
begin this section. I can say quite easily that I hate and despise the
cull with an intensity that I experience an immediate bodily reaction
while writing now. But from there it is less easy. I hear that crow
cawing though and wish to not give in out of weakness.
Last night I attended my first gig/concert since the pandemic and
lockdowns started over a year ago. The night was comprised of a lot of
folk rock music, fiddle playing and dancing, I saw more folky and
crustie friends than I expected to, and my legs are now very achy from
all the dancing. Among the friends I saw there were two who are active
in radical rebellions, one an activist involved in Extinction Rebellion
and the other a hunt saboteur also engaged in anti-cull rebellion. I was
immediately intensely joyful to see both of them, after extended periods
of distance. I am starting my description of the cull here because I
encounter this experience of joyful affirmation of the living presence
of other individuals, particularly those with a conflictual relationship
to this culture, as to be an intense point of differentiation from the
philosophy, practice and attitude of cull-culture.
It takes very little research to affirm that badgers are being cull as a
means for the infrastructure of agro-politics to be seen as “doing
something” to address bovine TB, while actually doing nothing of the
sort, as the disease is being spread due to horrendous agricultural
practices. Several years ago, I did some work experience on a small
free-range, organic, dairy farm, and I can remember the farmer spitting
venom about the cull, the horrendous practices and the farms where TB
was spreading, because the cows were being kept to close together and
the farmers were spreading TB infected muck across their fields. So I
don’t believe that the cull is a matter that is based in poor
information or a lack of information, and I’m not bringing here any
information, facts, figures, or knowledge, so as to present an analysis
of the cull – I sincerely doubt such an attempt would produce the
desired result, in much the same way that statistics regarding global
warming don’t result in any response. The description of the cull that
follows from here is intentionally expressive, rather than attempting
factual-realism.
The cull is nothing short of a Man-ufacturing effort attempting to
produce death, through systematic-machinery, as a mode of
anthropological-machinery that seeks to exclude these living beings,
called badgers by this culture, who do not conform to the narratives of
the Humanised Reality. Put more simply, it is a systemic effort in mass
killing, which is only not-comparable to genocidal war efforts and the
politics of ethnic-cleansing from a position of revolting speciesism. As
a dialectical-effort, the cull is seeking to negate the presence of
badgers, in the pursuit of Absolute-agricultural domination, as they are
positioned as an antithesis to the collective endeavour.
What else is the cull? The cull is a narrative of the production of
mass-extinction. The cull is lies and deceit and cowardice and a failure
to affirm the failures of farming-practices. The cull is state-apparatus
and approved by the government. The cull is practiced in the open, in a
culture that keeps its doors closed.
How do I experience the cull? I experience the cull as right here and
right now, as it is happening where I live, today. I experience the cull
when I go rambling through woods and find cages close to setts. I
experience the cull with a burning hatred for its practice, feelings of
disgust and detest, and a desire to revolt. I experience the cull as an
effort in erasing my ability to experience beautiful living anarchic
beings. I experience the cull as a Cause attempting to effect the
negation of badgers, which my egoism is revolted by and wants to see
collapsed.
I am ending this piece of writing on my anti-cull philosophy here. My
anti-cull rebellion is not ended and will not end, even if the badger
cull ends, as any and all cull-practices are revolting to me. The logic
of cull I reject. The machinery of cull I detest. The culture of cull is
horrendous and ultimately one of life-renunciation, which I refuse to
conform to. This will continue off of these pages, as I journey through
cull zones and within my being, as a primal experience of life
affirmation.
I long for a night with no cages to capture living beings.
[1] Uncivilisation, 2014
[2] The Myth of Sisyphus, 2005
[3] https://ecorevoltblog.files.wordpress.com/2020/12/on-gorgias-trilemma.pdf
[4] Feral Iconoclasm, 2018
[5] https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/julian-langer-doomed-to-deferral
[6] Mesodma, 2019
[7] https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/julian-langer-an-eco-egoist-destruction-of-species-being-and-speciesism
[8] The Principle of Unrest, 2017
[9] https://scholarlycommons.pacific.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1021&context=jmb
[10] http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/henry-david-thoreau-paradise-to-be-regained
[11] http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/henry-david-thoreau-walden
[12] http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/ralph-waldo-emerson-nature